With the UHD Alliance bringing out its new Ultra HD Premium certification, manufacturers at CES have been falling over themselves to announce their own TV's compliance. But Panasonic has gone one better and its new Ultra HD DX900 TVs meet both the Alliance's stringent Ultra HD Premium specifications, as well as 4K Certification from THX.
Coming in both 65 and 58-inch panel sizes, the new Panasonic DX900 TVs are designed to meet the latest picture standards and, if you've been paying attention to what's going down in Vegas at the start of this year, you'll know that it's all about high dynamic range (HDR) right now.
As part of the UHD Alliance's new Premium certification, the screen needs to be capable of delivering a good HDR experience and Panasonic's new Honeycomb panel structure has been created to help this LCD display meet the necessarily high HDR luminance levels without compromising on the depth of its blacks.
It's been a matter for debate as to whether a traditional LCD screen would be capable of offering a quality HDR experience, especially while OLED displays, like Panasonic's own TX-65CZ952, can hit the sort of black levels previously only Plasma TVs enjoyed.
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Panasonic contends the Honeycomb local dimming tech can produce such an experience. The new design divides the area up into hundreds of discretely controlled lighting areas, which are kept isolated from each other to minimise the halo effect.
By reducing the light-leakage normally associated with traditional LED backlit LCD screens, Panasonic claims it can produce both ultra bright luminance peaks – up to 1,000 nits – and deep blacks in close proximity to each other.
And with the Firefox OS software in the Panasonic DX900 soon set to support Amazon Instant Video's HDR streams, as well as support for the soon-to-be-announced Netflix HDR goodness, the high dynamic range content pool is ever growing.
And if you pair Panasonic's new DX900 4K TV up with its new UB900 Ultra HD Blu-ray player you'll also find there's a wealth of Hollywood HDR coming your way shortly too.
The Panasonic DX900 is set for a Spring launch this year, so we'll see how its new Honeycomb panel really stands up against its OLED and SUHD rivals then.
